Larry Kramer, AIDS crusader and playwright, dies at 84
Larry Kramer Image by David Shankbone, Wikimedia Commons
By PJ Grisar May 27, 2020
Larry Kramer, the firebrand playwright who ignited bold protests over the government’s inaction to the AIDS crisis, died Wednesday morning of pneumonia. Kramer, who was H.I.V. positive and battled poor health for years, was 84.
Kramer was all but ousted from the AIDS activism group Gay Men’s Health Crisis for his militancy in 1982. He then co-founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987. ACT UP would go on to stage supine protests at the New York Stock Exchange and during mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, bearing placards reading “Silence = Death” with the pink triangle used in Nazi concentration camps.
Kramer charged government officials with “genocide” while ACT UP’s members blocked walkways on Wall Street and by the steps of the General Post Office in the course of their “die-ins,” attracting widespread media coverage in the process. The sensationalism was the point — people started to take notice.
“I don’t regret anything I’ve done or said,” Kramer said in a 2015 Time magazine interview. “No matter what you say, some people are going to like it and some people aren’t. So it hasn’t shut me up at all. Inside I’m just as tempestuous.”
When Kramer first began his activism in the early 1980s, he learned that diplomacy and abiding by red tape wouldn’t prompt a government response.
“What’s really required to get attention in this country, I’ve learned, is being extreme,” Kramer told The New York Times in 1994. “If you write a calm letter and fax it to nobody, it sinks like a brick in the Hudson.”
And yet, Kramer did write. A lot. And words were among his greatest weapons.
He penned vicious, open letters to publications (including broadsides of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, who later became a friend). A 1987 speech of Kramer’s prompted the creation of ACT UP and his plays and essays continued to be an important catalyst.
Kramer wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the 1969 film adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” which he also produced. Kramer then spoke about gay love in a characteristically pugnacious way with his polarizing debut novel, “Faggots,” which led some in the gay community to perceive him as self-loathing and prudish. Kramer was known not only for his brash, insistent spirit, but his moralizing, arguing that gay men and lesbian women should be in committed relationships and abjure promiscuity.
Kramer’s autobiographical play “The Normal Heart” debuted at the Public Theatre in 1985. Like most things in Kramer’s life, the play was political, charting his activism through the AIDS crisis
“The playwright starts off angry, soon gets furious and then skyrockets into sheer rage,” Frank Rich wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Although Mr. Kramer’s theatrical talents are not always as highly developed as his conscience, there can be little doubt that ‘The Normal Heart’ is the most outspoken play around – or that it speaks up about a subject that justifies its author’s unflagging, at times even hysterical, sense of urgency.”
It remains his best-known play, winning a Tony Award for Best Revival in 2011 and spawning an Emmy-award-winning HBO adaptation in 2014.
Kramer continued to write — penning more autobiographical plays, a memoir and two hefty novels, “The American People,” volumes one and two — attacking American society in Tom Wolfe-ian terms. Through his writing life, he was often quite ill with liver disease and other maladies and often believed himself to be on the cusp of death.
The Associated Press infamously jumped the gun in 2001, reporting that he had died.
Kramer is survived by his husband, David Webster, an architect, whom he married in 2013.
The New York Times reports that at the time of his death, Kramer was working on a play about the current epidemic.
“It’s about gay people having to live through three plagues,” Kramer told The Times, those plagues being H.I.V./AIDS, Covid-19 and the decline of the human body.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at Grisar@Forward.com.
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